"Journalism on the Net. Journalistic Form and Function in the Transition from Paper to Screen."

Ph.d. project, affiliated with Dept. of Media Studies, University of Bergen. Started spring 1997, terminated spring 2001.

Keywords: Electronic newspapers, hypertext, coherence, journalism, reader-panel

The project is an investigation - conducted basically from a text-linguistic point of view - of what happens when the traditionally paper-based genres of journalism meet the hypertextual and multimedia World Wide Web. It is structured as five sub-projects:

1. Journalism in the digital age. Challenges and trends.

General introduction.

2. Hypertext. What is it, and how can it be used in journalism?

In this part I will present some of the basic features and problems of hypertext - mostly from a linguistic point of view - and try to relate them to the specific field of journalism.

3. Hypertext and Coherence

I have for some time been engaged with the the question of coherence, especially in connection to the intelligibility of news. Consequently, in this project I will make a theoretical investigation of the relation between hypertext and coherence. Clearly, this is a central issue when it comes to the question of applying different kinds of hypertext in the presentation of news.

4. The electronic newspaper - is it still a newspaper?

Contrastive text analysis, especially aimed at text-linguistic, rhetorical and presentational features of the new discourse of digital newspapers.

5. Digital journalism: How do the users view it?

Results from a survey among 200 users of an online newspaper in Western Norway.

The questions that I want the informants to answer range from simple questions of habits to more complex questions of attitudes and preferences. The study is set up as a panel-project, where the panel is to fill in six online questionnaires over a period of 20 months.

Hypernews: Revolution or Contradiction? Short paper held at The Eight ACM Conference of Hypertext, April 1997 in Southampton, UK.

Hypernews and the problem of objectivity. Short paper held february 1999 at The Tenth ACM Conference on Hypertext, Hypertext 99 in Darmstadt, Germany.

E-mail: martin.engebretsen@hia.no